


A Quick Kiss on Our Anniversary

by Morgan_Elektra



Series: 1000 Kisses [12]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: 1000 kisses, Anniversary, Boys Kissing, Canon Divergence - Post-Hogwarts, Emotions, Established Relationship, Family Feels, Harry Potter Epilogue What Epilogue | EWE, Headmaster Harry Potter, M/M, POV Harry Potter, Present Tense, True Love's Kiss, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-09
Updated: 2019-09-09
Packaged: 2020-10-13 04:16:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,826
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20576318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morgan_Elektra/pseuds/Morgan_Elektra
Summary: Life is made up of millions of moments. Relationships are made up of thousands of kisses. Each one is its own story.A celebration calls to mind the past and illuminates the present.





	A Quick Kiss on Our Anniversary

**Author's Note:**

> This series will be an on-going one, consisting of shortish vignettes of Harry and Draco's relationship, all centered around a kiss. Some happy. Some sad. Some momentous. Some fleeting. In no particular order. I like to imagine Harry and Draco sitting together somewhere and recounting (and re-counting) their kisses... all while I gleefully record them. Think of the numbers as the order they're recalled in by them, but I'm relating them as I choose.
> 
> The ultimate goal is to write all 1000... but I don't know how long that will take!
> 
> BUT MORGAN, you say, THIS ONE DOESN'T HAVE A NUMBER! And you are absolutely right. It doesn't. Because I've decided that anything that falls into flash fiction or drabble word count territory (1k ish words or less) will just be deemed a 'Quick Kiss'. No numbers. They will still be part of the same universe.
> 
> Inspired by the poem 'Out of Catullus' by Richard Crashaw (which is essentially a translation of Catullus 5)
> 
> Come and let us live my Deare,  
Let us love and never feare,  
What the sowrest Fathers say:  
Brightest Sol that dies to day  
Lives againe as blithe to morrow,  
But if we darke sons of sorrow  
Set; o then, how long a Night  
Shuts the Eyes of our short light!  
Then let amorous kisses dwell  
On our lips, begin and tell  
A Thousand, and a Hundred, score  
An Hundred, and a Thousand more,  
Till another Thousand smother  
That, and that wipe of another.  
Thus at last when we have numbred  
Many a Thousand, many a Hundred;  
Wee’l confound the reckoning quite,  
And lose our selves in wild delight:  
While our joyes so multiply,  
As shall mocke the envious eye

Harry hasn’t had the dream in years. A decade or more, at least. But it grips him with the same urgency as always, making his heart beat too fast. The green-gold glow of the Fiendfyre. The roar and heat of it. Sweat drips down his face and turns his palms slippery on his broom.

Beneath him, Draco looks so incredibly young. His silver-grey eyes are shadowed, the point of his chin trembling. There’s fear in that look, but resignation as well. He believes he will die there, in those flames.

Despite the inferno around them, Draco’s fingers are cold when Harry grasps them. Smooth and slim.

They slip so easily from between his own.

In the way of dreams, Harry knows it didn’t really happen this way. He remembers the feel of Draco’s trembling body pressed against his. And everything that came after is there too. The Battle, the Aurors, remodeling Grimmauld, Draco’s potion shop, teaching at Hogwarts… His whole life. 

But the dream still feels so real. His lungs burn and his heart tears as he watches Draco tumble back into the flames, mouth wide, screaming.

“Dad?”

Harry jerks awake, blinking.

All he can see is a soft blue-grey muddle and he realizes he’s not wearing his glasses. He glances around, smiling a bit sheepishly as Callie steps closer and extends a hand with the wireframes folded neatly on her palm.

“Are you alright?” She cocks her head, chin up, looking very like her father as she narrows her eyes at him.

Harry chuckles, sliding the glasses onto his nose and tucking the arms over his ears. Though the only light comes from the fireplace across the room, he knows the space well enough by now to pick out the details. The glass-fronted cabinet along the wall is mostly full of things given to him by the children, and now his grandchildren, but once it held a Pensieve.

The space where Fawkes’ perch used to be is now filled with a tall, ornate clock. If he could see the face from his position, the hands for himself and Callie would be pointed directly at HOGWARTS.

And of course, portraits of his predecessors line the walls. A quick glance at Snape shows one dark brow quirked in judgement. Harry shakes his head. He runs his fingers through his hair, attempting to smooth the patch at the back that’s become snarled during his unscheduled nap. He smiles at his daughter, who still watches him warily.

“I’m fine. You just startled me.”

Behind her own glasses, her irises—as green as his—twinkle with amusement. “You were dreaming about Father. You said his name.”

Harry feels the heat stinging his cheeks. After so many years, he should be used to the children catching him and Draco in embarrassing situations. He’s lost track of how many times it’s happened. But he blushes anyway, knowing she thinks his mind was full of prurient images. If only that was true. Harry would have preferred that.

Not that he’s going to disabuse her of whatever romantic idea she’s spun his dream into in her head.

When Harry stands, the joints of his knees creak and his hip twinges, but that doesn’t stop him from putting his arm around Callie’s waist and pulling her into a tight hug. She smells like lavender, but underneath that he can detect the faint trace of chocolate. There’s a tiny smudge of it just beside her lip. Harry’s mouth curves into a wider smile. Ever since she was small, she’s had an enormous sweet tooth, and chocolate has always been her favorite.

He squeezes her tighter.

Callie rests her pointed chin on his shoulder.

“I came to bring you home. Everyone’s waiting.”

Harry steps back, holds her away from him. Her pale blonde hair is pulled back into a long braid, showing off her cheekbones and jawline. Most people think she looks like Draco, because of the hair. But Harry thinks that, of all their children, she has the most of both of them.

Scorpius looks like a clone of Draco, though his build is broader, like Harry’s. Al is the spit of Harry, but with his father’s silver eyes. Lyra, with her bright red hair, is often mistaken for one of her Weasley cousins, even though her features echo those of a young Narcissa Black.

But Calathea is the perfect blend of himself and Draco.

He strokes a hand down her braid, love and gratitude welling within him like water. The old grief is still there, but it’s a soft, distant ache. There were so many times in the early days that he was sure she wouldn’t make it to her fifth birthday, and now here she is a grown woman with her own potions shop in France.

The memory of Draco’s fierce, sharp face rises in his mind, his refusal to even entertain the idea that Callie wouldn’t make it.

“Damn it, Potter, where’s The Boy Who Lived? He’s who I need here right now.”

Harsh as the words had been, they had been just what he needed at the time. 

“Dad.”

Callie tweaks his beard, drawing his attention back to her earlier words.

“What? Oh. Hell. I only meant to come to the office for a few minutes to catch up on some paperwork for next term while your brother got everything set up. Have I been gone long?”

She shakes her head, making her braid dance. “No. Al sent me up to get you. He said the food is nearly ready.”

“Well, let’s get back then.”

She loops her arm through his as they walk toward the fireplace. “The kids all wanted to come with me, but thankfully Edmund and Sylvie coaxed them into a game of Quidditch on the back lawn instead.”

Harry tries to imagine all seventeen of the grandchildren, not one of them over the age of ten, pouring out of the fireplace into his office. The laugh that bursts forth shakes his whole body.

“They’re curious, I’d guess.”

“And they love their grandpa,” she says, nodding, nudging him with her elbow.

He reaches for the dish of floo powder on the mantle, wincing a little as his arthritis-thickened joints protest. When he tosses the handful of grains into the flames, they flare green, reminding him of his dream.

A shudder works down his spine and a small curl of remembered fear twines through his belly. Harry brushes it off and gestures for Callie to step in ahead of him.

“See you at home, Dad.” She blows him a kiss before murmuring ‘Primrose Cottage’ and disappearing in a whoosh.

Harry casts a quick glance over his office in the dim light before stepping into the flames and back out in the living room of the cottage in Hogsmeade. The room is empty when he climbs off the hearth, the thick beige carpet silencing the flat soles of his Oxfords.

As the fire dies down behind him, the sound of revelry drifts through an open window from the back garden. Harry smiles at the high-pitched shrieks of his grandchildren. He can hear the deep, even voice of Lyra’s husband Edmund encouraging one of the kids to hold tightly to their broom, while their wife Sylvie chastises another for hogging the quaffle.

There are more voices, too much for Harry to pick out any one.

Dishes clatter in the kitchen. Al’s laugh mixes with Scorpius’, and then Ron cuts in with a, “Not so old, then, eh lad?”

Harry glances in the antique mirror in the corner, happy to see that his robe isn’t too wrinkled. He’s managed to keep the dark blue fabric reasonably clean as well, without a single ink splotch to be seen. His beard is neatly trimmed, no food stuck in the thick, mostly white hair. Aside from the small patch of unruly locks on the back of his head, he looks quite well, really.

Again, he tries and fails to smooth the wayward hair.

The sound of a chuckle behind him makes Harry turn, a sheepish grin tilting his lips. Draco leans in the conservatory doorway, late afternoon sunlight shining off his pale hair. He wears it long now, like his father, though he generally keeps it tied back, like it is now. Harry studies his husband’s face, the creases at the corners of his eyes and the sharp curve of his mouth. All these years and he’s still not tired of looking at Draco.

“What are you doing in here? Oughtn’t you to be outside with the kids?”

“Says the man who went to hide in his office.” Draco sweeps him with a look, one pale eyebrow cocked. “Anyway, I was looking for something.”

Harry takes a step closer, still drawn toward the man he’s spent the last forty years with, like metal filings to a magnet. 

“Oh? What’s that?”

Draco’s attention drifts to the wall behind Harry, lined with photographs that span the decades--holidays, birthdays, outings with the extended family. In the center of the wall of photographs is one of a young Harry and Draco at one of Luna’s garden parties, one of their first outings as an actual couple. The figures in the frame have eyes only for each other. Draco turns his gaze back to Harry’s face.

Harry closes the inches between them and cups Draco’s face in his palms, feeling the softness of his skin and the strength of the bone beneath.

There’s a smile in Draco’s silver eyes as he dips his head to lower his mouth to Harry’s. The kiss is tender, their lips fitting together like puzzle pieces, as if made for each other. After so much time, neither one of them doubts the perfection of it. 

It starts off soft, a gentle mouth-to-mouth, but even so many years since that first kiss, the fake one in the alley, there is something in the way Draco presses against him that sets Harry aflame. It doesn’t matter where or when.

There’s nothing tentative in the way Draco’s tongue touches his lower lip, seeking entrance. Harry is happy to grant it, feeling Draco’s arms slide around his waist. 

A roughly cleared throat breaks them apart. Scorpius grins and rolls his eyes. “Alright, you two? Supper’s ready and everyone’s waiting on you.”

“Just coming,” Harry says, shaking his head at their son. 

Scorpius spins on his heel and makes an escape with a muttered, “Parents.”

When Harry turns back to Draco there is a glow in his eyes that warms him down to his bones. Draco’s hands tighten on Harry’s waist.

“Happy Anniversary, love.”

Harry steps back, taking a deep breath of Draco’s green scent, and extends his hand. Draco takes it, interlacing their fingers. Harry tugs at their linked hands. “Wait. Weren’t you looking for something?”

The look Draco gives him from the corner of his eye is sharp and loving. He squeezes Harry’s fingers. “ Oh, I found it.”


End file.
